Rebecca MacKinnon's postings about work, reading, and ideas from 2004-2011.

October 01, 2008

Last week, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales had a meeting with Cai Mingzhao, Vice Director of China's State Council Information Office - the government body whose "Internet Management Division" is in charge of censoring online content. They discussed Jimmy's concerns about censorship. No deals or agreements were made, but Jimmy tells me that the meeting has opened a channel of communication and dialogue between the Wikipedia community and the Chinese government.

Many Chinese wikipedians and bloggers first found out about the meeting from the State Council Information Office's own website, which posted the picture above along with a brief text that said only: "On the afternoon of September 25th, the State Council Information Office Vice Director Cai Mingzhao received the founder of the American Wikipedia, Mr. Jimmy Wales. Liu Zhengrong of the Fifth Division and others also accompanied the meeting." (The Fifth Division is in charge of the Internet. Liu famously told the world in 2006 that Chinese Internet censorship is no different than what goes on in the West and most other countries.)

The official website gave no further information about what was discussed. IT blogger Keso - on his blogspot blog but not on his main China-hosted blog - remarked: "In this kind of meeting, it's unclear what Cai Mingzhao is smiling at Wales about, it must have been interesting." I saw Jimmy on Saturday at the World Economic Forum meeting in Tianjin. (Jimmy is one of the WEF's Young Global Leaders.) I told him that news of his meeting was on the Internet and that people were starting to wonder what was up. He was surprised, because he said his interlocutors had indicated they didn't want the meeting to be public.

Since 2005 Wikipedia - both Chinese and English - has been blocked in China, but it was unblocked in the run-up to the Olympics, along with a number of other overseas websites. At last year's Wikimania meeting in Taipei, Jimmy was adamant in stating that neither Wikipedia nor his company, Wikia, will ever agree to censor content at the request of Chinese authorities. Google's decision to offer a censored search engine in China, he said last year, was "a bad business decision for Google...When there is a sufficient amount of change that the Great Firewall is torn down, the Chinese people will appreciate that Wikipedia stood its moral ground."

Jimmy told me last Saturday that the State Council meeting had been a "get to know each other" kind of conversation. He raised concerns about the blockage of Wikipedia, welcomed its unblocking, and expressed the hope that it would remain unblocked.

They did not discuss the fact that the Great Firewall is getting more sophisticated: it doesn't need to block whole websites anymore, anyway. It can just block individual pages or sections as needed. While China is no longer blocking all of Wikipedia, individual pages on the Chinese website continue to be blocked, in my own experience. For example: you can access the Chinese Wikipedia page for "Tiananmen Square" from at least some ISP's in mainland China, but when I tried to access the page for "June 4th Incident" from Beijing on Sunday, I got an error message.

Since my conversation with Jimmy about his meeting was in a casual social context and I didn't get a chance to take notes, I thought it best to e-mail him to re-confirm some things before blogging about it. Here is the full text of our exchange:

MacKinnon: Am I correct in understanding that you didn't reach any specific agreement with Cai Mingzhao or other State Council people?

Wales: That's right. It was a friendly meeting to get to know each other a bit.

MacKinnon: I understand he said he'd like the state council to be able to communicate with you about concerns they have in the future about content appearing on Wikipedia. Is that correct?

Wales: Yes. The idea is to open up lines of communication.

MacKinnon: Am I also correct in understanding that you are open to making changes if they point out content that does not comply with NPOV ["neutral point of view"] standards?

Wales: Yes, the same as with such concerns from anyone. If content is not in keeping with our policies, we appreciate people pointing it out to us.

MacKinnon: I understand that in your conversation with Cai, you welcomed the unblocking of Wikipedia in China and said you hoped it would stay that way, correct?

Wales: I mentioned that there have been problems of access in the past, though things are currently good, and we hope that things will remain good going forward.

MacKinnon: Did you raise any concerns about the fact that, while the English and Chinese sites as a whole are unblocked, individual pages (for instance, pages about Falun Gong or the Tiananmen Crackdown) continue to be blocked?

Wales: Actually, in English, I was able to access those pages and similar ones. I am unsure about the exact current situation with respect to what pages are being filtered. Since I wasn't sure of the exact details, and just due to the way the conversation went (more high level than about specific details), I didn't raise this question.

MacKinnon: Did you say that you want those pages to be unblocked? Or are you cool with the fact that a few politically sensitive pages are blocked as long as most of Wikipedia is unblocked?

Wales: We didn't discuss it. But, I am not cool with any censorship of Wikipedia. However, I do think it is much better for a few politically sensitive pages to be blocked than for everything to be blocked. And we will never cooperate with any blocking or censorship of neutral encyclopedic content.

MacKinnon: What are the next steps? Did either side designate points of contact for further discussions?

Wales: We will follow up by email with them to designate points of contact, and I am going to try to visit again in a few months time, perhaps to visit with more direct implementors.

If Wikipedia gets the Chinese government to engage in an open and transparent discussion with its community about whether certain content is or isn't adhering to "neutral point of view" standards and whether it should be deleted or changed, that would be unprecedented. As a member of the Wikimedia advisory board, I hope and expect that Wikipedia will not engage in an un-transparent manner with any government.

Will China change Wikipedia or will Wikipedia change China? Or will they both change each other? So far, Western Internet companies working in China, and engaging with Chinese regulators, have inevitably seen themselves changed by the experience. Will a non-profit grassroots citizen media organization be able to maintain a higher moral ground and get Chinese government officials to engage in a public discussion about censorship? Or will the State Council, by pressuring local Wikipedians who are vulnerable to state subversion and state secrets laws, find ways to bend Wikipedia subtly to its will?

August 03, 2007

Wikipedia founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales says that Wikia, his new for-profit wiki and search engine company, will never censor its content or compromise its users the way Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others have done in China.

In Taipei at Wikimania, the annual world conference for people who work on Wikipedia and all its associated projects, Jimbo gave a presentation about Wikia, describing how he plans to create an open search engine which anybody on the planet can help build, and whose algorithms will be made public. For more about Wikia search click here, here, and here. Even if Wikia doesn't beat Google, its entry into the search engine space could well bring a great deal of change to the way all search engines are expected to operate and how they relate to their users.

Jimbo has stood firm and refused to censor the Chinese Wikipedia, even though that means it is blocked in mainland China most of the time. I asked him whether he thinks Wikia, as a for-profit company, can afford to take the same high moral ground when most other major Internet companies have found that impossible - because they feel they simply cannot afford to be shut out of the world's fastest growing market which will soon contain the world's biggest pool of Internet users.

Will Wikia censor? Jimbo said: "we dont anticipate ever doing that." He said that the creation of a censored search engine for the Chinese market was "a bad business decision for Google... The damage they've done for their brand in the long run is substantial." While he still likes Google, he said "it really has changed from the day when you thought, wow, Google is fantastic. Whatever money they're making in the short run, I think they've damaged their global brand."

"When there is a sufficient amount of change that the Great Firewall is torn down," he said, "the Chinese people will appreciate that Wikipedia stood its moral ground. Google has lost its ability to do that."

UPDATE: Here is a report from Taiwan's CNA news agency summarizing what Jimbo said at a separate press conference about Wikipedia and China.

The basic story: Apparently in December somebody posted untrue information on golfer Fuzzy Zoeller's Wikipedia entry, alleging drug use. Zoeller is now suing a law firm whose computer appears to have been used by somebody to post that information. Good luck tracking down the physical person who posted the offending information via an IP address belonging to a computer belonging to that firm....

1. How long was the libelous information on the front of the Zoeller wikipedia page before it was taken off?
2. When Zoeller or one of his minions discovered what had happened, did they try to correct his page? (After all anybody can edit wikipedia without even creating a username.)
3. Apparently this information was picked up by some other websites but nobody specifies what they were. What kinds of sites were they? Sites belonging to news organizations? Chatrooms? Blogs?

Does anybody out there know the answers? If so please post them in my comments section.

One other interesting thing: the news stories all mention that the offending information was removed from Zoeller's Wikipedia page. Here some stuff they didn't mention: Normally when something gets removed from Wikipedia it can still be found in the page's history section which documents all changes ever made to it. However according to the discussion page for the Zoeller entry, the offending material has been removed by administrators even from the history page. If you scroll down that discussion page you'll see that one wikipedian has responded to somebody's question about whether it was correct to do so: "It makes no sense to make these revision available. Maintaining them would be asking for Wikipedia to be sued. The libel text can be viewed in the lawsuit."

From that discussion page you can see that Wikipedians continue to watch the page closely. My favorite remark: "Heh someone beat me to removing the pe--s joke in the version you reverted to :-)" [p-word was changed by me so as not to trigger filters on people's work computers and such]

Cass Sunstein, author of the excellent book Infotopia, has an essay titled A Brave New Wikiworld in today's Washington Post. He describes Wikipedia as the small beginning of a new technology-driven reality in which the dispersed masses aggregate and shape human knowledge - not just elite editors and journalists. He argues that this is similar to how markets, comprised of small choices made by many millions of people, dictate prices:

Wikipedia's entries are not exactly prices, but they do aggregate the widely dispersed information of countless volunteer writers and editors. In this respect, Wikipedia is merely one of many experiments in aggregating knowledge and creativity, that have been made possible by new technologies.

The good and bad of Wikipedia is not dissimilar to the good and bad of stock prices: "No less than stock prices, prediction markets may be subject to manipulation." He also believes "we're seeing the tip of a very large iceberg." Might it be instructive to look at how markets evolved from the early days of capitalism to get a sense of how to prevent abuses in the new and emerging "market of information" that Wikipedia represents?

As it so happens, my class has just been learning about wikis and Wikipedia. (In addition to the obligatory assignment to edit a Wikipedia entry themselves, and observe the relevant "history" and "talk" pages, readings include the recent New Yorker piece on Wikipedia, a NYT story about how courts use Wikipedia, and Andy Carvin's recent post about Middlebury College's ban on the use of Wikipedia as a source in papers. I also showed them Steve Colbert's recent hilarious comedy routine on "Wikilobbying." ) This ongoing case will be great fodder for student blogs and student-led discussions about their assignment and the readings this coming week.